1. Technical Field
The embodiments herein generally relate to semiconductor processing technologies, and more specifically, to high throughput metrology methods used to determine the coverage of a thin film over patterned features in semiconductor processing technologies.
2. Description of the Related Art
The ability to process uniformly across a monolithic substrate and/or across a series of monolithic substrates is advantageous for manufacturing efficiency and cost effectiveness, as well as repeatability and control. However, uniform processing across an entire substrate can be disadvantageous when optimizing, qualifying, or investigating new materials, new processes, and/or new process sequence integration schemes, since the entire substrate is nominally made the same using the same materials, processes, and process sequence integration schemes. Each processed substrate generally represents, in essence, only one possible variation per substrate. Thus, the full wafer uniform processing under conventional processing techniques results in fewer data points per substrate, longer times to accumulate a wide variety of data, and higher costs associated with obtaining such data.
Conventional techniques generally do not efficiently screen and analyze an array of materials, processes, and process sequence integration schemes across a substrate, and thus typically do not efficiently evaluate alternative materials, processes, and process sequence integration schemes for semiconductor manufacturing processes.